The Missing of the Somme

"If I should die, think only this of me,That there's some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England."-- Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)"What passing bells for these who die as cattle?"-- Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)Why is it that the Great War exerts such power over the European literary imagination, even as we approach the centenary of its outbreak, a power that the Second World War cannot remotely equal? Perhaps because of the sheer scale of the carnage. Perhaps because, in the popular mind, it remains a war without reason, whose causes only historians fully understand. Perhaps because, as novelist Geoff Dyer points out in this extended essay, it was a war that memorialized itself from its inception, to be fought and written about in the future perfect, with an eye to how future generations will see it. And it is a war that seems to have taken a 180-degree turn in public perception over the course of the century, without ever losing its enormity as a memorial to heroism or folly.I have witnessed these changes for myself. At the age of ten, I was taught the structure of a sonnet, not from the works of Shakespeare or Keats, but from the poem by Rupert Brooke quoted above, then considered the epitome of English patriotic modesty. Remembrance Day in November, the red poppies in everyone's lapels, the two-minute silence observed nationwide, these were more than empty rituals. At chapel each day in my boarding school, I sat under the memorial to Rupert Brooke (an alumnus), whose complete sonnet was carved into the marble. Taking weekly communion in the Memorial Chapel, I was surrounded on three sides by the names of the fallen in the Great War (with only one wall for the later conflict). They were contemporaries, and in some cases the friends, of my father, who had gone to France as a lieutenant of eighteen, and returned a twice-decorated hero. But a scarred one, as I would later discover, unwilling to talk at all about his experiences, fleeing from almost every aspect of the England in which he had been raised. On his death, I would discover a letter written by his father in India on the occasion of his first posting, silently questioning the purpose of the War, but prevented from saying so by his position as a servant of Empire. Then, when I was at college, Benjamin Britten's  WAR REQUIEM  came out, setting the anti-heroic realism of Wilfred Owen against the Latin text. Owen was a poet entirely unknown to me, though I immediately bought his collected works with a college prize; Dyer refers to him now as "the poet everyone knows." Owen is remembered; Brooke is not. Somewhere around the middle of the century, the whole view of the War-once-called-Great had wheeled around almost completely.Dyer writes a rather messy book, switching between personal narrative and objective analysis, between his own voice and numerous quotations from others, but it is full of magnificent insights. He too has a personal stake, trying to understand the lives of his two grandfathers, each of whom fought on the Somme. But his main focus is on how the War has been memorialized: in the poetry of Brooke, Owen, Blunden, and Sassoon; in the spate of memoirs that followed in the twenties; in official histories; in the sculpted memorials that sprang up all over Europe; in novels of the second and third generation, each trying to understand the inexplicable, to find some humanity in the inhumane, and standing on each others' shoulders to do so. Dyer himself draws heavily on Paul Fussell's  THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY , an influence he freely acknowledges. If nothing else, Dyer has written an invaluable reader's guide to war literature, singling out such remarkable books as Erich Maria Remarque's  ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT , Sebastian Faulks'  BIRDSONG , and Pat Barker's  REGENERATION  (in which Owen and Sassoon are characters). But he goes further, exploring how the significance of any great subject resides as much in how it is written about as in the historical facts.The black and white photographs, the personal journey that occupies the latter part of the book, and the deep reflection all foreshadow the work of WG Sebald, whose  AUSTERLITZ  would anatomize the aftermath of the later war. I wish he could have used the Sebald model to organize the entire book. It must be to deliberately jarring effect that he emphasizes the sophomoric quality of his first of his two trips, made with two rambunctious college friends in a ramshackle car they call the "tank" and viewing the rain-sodden landscape through the barely working windscreen wipers, which of course they call the Ypres. But when Dyer returns alone, his reactions are powerful, as here at the German cemetery at Langemark: "At the edge of the Kamaradengrab stand four mourning figures, silhouetted against the zinc sky. Up close these are poorly sculpted figures, but from a distance they impart a sense of utter desolation to the place. It is as if the minute's silence for which they have bowed their heads has been extended for the duration of eternity." He is equally evocative at the Canadian Memorial at Vimy Ridge, treated so memorably by Jane Urquhart in  THE STONE CARVERS  (though after Dyer's book, which was first published in 1994). And he is soberly anti-heroic in pointing out that the brooding mausoleum at Thiepval, built without any Christian symbolism, "is a memorial if not to the death, then certainly to the superfluousness of God." My own worship in the memorial chapel is a thing of the past.

That is Geoff Dyer's caption for a photograph by William Rider-Rider of the devastated battlefield of Passchendaele. "The scene is divided evenly between land and sky. A line of blasted trees separates the shattered foreground from the land-ocean, the sea of mud, which * * * reaches to the horizon. There is no perspective. The vanishing-point is no longer a more or less exact point, but all around. A new kind of infinity: more of the same in every direction, an infinity of waste."If I had been Geoff Dyer (please pardon the presumptuousness), "An Infinity of Waste" would have been the title of this book. Instead, the title, THE MISSING OF THE SOMME, is taken from the letters high on the Thiepval Memorial, on which are recorded the names of 73,077 men who lost their lives in the Battle of the Somme but whose remains were never identified. Thiepval and the site of the Battle of the Somme were the last places Dyer visited in his tours of the cemeteries of the Great War, as preparation for this book of meditations on the Great War, the ways it has come to be remembered, and its influence on Western humanity today.Originally published in 1994 and recently re-issued, it is a superb book. It is not a history of World War I, but nonetheless it is a must for any serious student or scholar of WWI. Rather than history, it focuses on the ways the War has become history - the ways it is remembered.Still, THE MISSING OF THE SOME contains plenty of historical factoids or anecdotes of note. For example, in the first months of the war "football [soccer] was used as an incentive to enlistment"; the recruiters advertised that the war offered men the chance to play "the greatest game of all" and by the end of 1914 half a million Englishmen had enlisted through sporting organizations such as football clubs. As matters developed, early in the war the British were completely unprepared for the massive number of corpses generated in this glorious game of War, and burial of the dead was haphazard and inefficient. "By the time of the great battles of attrition of 1916-17 mass graves were dug in advance of major offensives. Singing columns of soldiers fell grimly silent as they marched by these gaping pits en route to the front-line trenches."Dyer is British (both his grandfathers fought in the Great War), so the book has a decided British orientation. And its geographic scope is limited to the Western Front (though, of course, that provides more than enough material for any meditation on the Great War). Much of the book deals with the cemeteries and memorials to the dead (of which there are a handful of photographs), or with the Great War in literature and poetry (including, of course, Wilfred Owen). This is territory previously explored by others, most notably Paul Fussell in "The Great War and Modern Memory", to which Dyer pays tribute. But Dyer adds much that is original, at least to me. And with a subject as rich and expansive as this one, even the occasional repetition is welcome.If you have read any of Dyer's other books, you know that he can be willfully eccentric. THE MISSING OF THE SOMME is no exception. On occasion I found his idiosyncratic and mildly self-absorbed narrative annoying and/or flippant. Likewise, a few of the observations he offers are badly wayward. They, however, are offset several times over by the number of astute insights. It is a brief and intelligent book, well worth the several hours required to read it. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the Great War, provided you are not looking to it as a conventional history.

Geoff Dyer's superbly readable "The Missing of the Somme" defies easy description. At one level, it is the narrative of a visit by the author and his friends to the Somme Battlefield in northeast France. At another level, it is the struggle of the author to make sense of what he sees and what it means. At still another, it is a review of the effort to commemorate the Great War and its victims.The author is a gifted writer, familiar with the literature and the history of the First World War. His book makes a good faith effort to come to terms with the sacrifices represented by the Somme Battlefield's memorials and cemeteries. The narrative is nicely helped along with a collection of black and white photographs that evoke a sense of what people were trying to remember when they built the monuments and interred the dead. Perhaps this book is especially relevant in the current age of the tearing down of monuments. Well recommended.

This book is a lyrical tribute to the lost men of World War I, as counterintuitive as that may sound. I haven't read too may books about war that describe its effects on society the way this one does - it describes the men departing for war as those "already dead," for example, and proceeds to describe why that was true. It's a very short, impressionistic book with haunting images. It's hard to believe that the "war to end all wars" began over 100 years ago, but this book will make it sound immediate and real without dragging the reader through battle plans and descriptions of strategy over rough terrain. It is an impressionistic view of war and its effect on society but it is not preachy. It's sad but not maudlin. It does show that patterns are repeated over time.

Dyer is not the person to read if you're looking for strong narrative threads. He is the person to read if you want to find out new things, be taken to places you never, ever dreamed existed and be entertained whilst learning a lot. The book, flits around the central idea of what memorials are, particularly in relevance to World War One, why we need them, how we make them and how we interpret them. It moves between academic research and the vague and sometimes comic wanderings of Dyer and his mates as they trudge through the fields of France looking for memorials and the scenes of battle. Dyer's original mind, quirky personality and enthusiasm for his subject make this book rise above the average history of WWI into something at times approaching art. I had a copy of this book years ago and then lent it to someone who never gave it back. It's a testament to his brilliance that I had no hesitation in going out to buy another copy. It's one to keep, to read and re-read.

Great book - bought to replace the one I lent out years ago and that never returned... quite poetic really. This is a 'must' for anyone interested in the War, the Battle, and its continuing impact today. Though it isn't the most recent on the topic, Dyer's book fully deserves its place amongst the most iconic of modern treatments about The Somme, and about commemoration, there and anywhere touched by war. It's good to see that it's still possible to buy a brand new copy, and this one came almost by return, well packed and very much as hoped.

The 'author' tended to treat the whole Western Front as a joke e.g. a serious attempt at addressing the subject would not be joking about getting 'pissed' and missing out on what should have been a highlight of the trip. The book went straight in the rubbish bin rather than passing on or keeping

Excellent book on the subject, however I have deducted a star as the author will insist on using England and English rather than Britain/ British / Commonwealth. Those remain missing on the Somme and are commemorated on the Thiepval and other memorials came from far and wide.

I usually like Geoff Dwyer's method of writing blending critical insight , anecdote and wordplay, but here I think the subject overwhelms him and the style falls to pieces as the book continues, ending as a rather maudlin travelogue. I was impressed by his survey of contemporary o attitudes and approaches to memorializing the war and how this influences how we have subsequently seen it, and would recommend the book to those interested in that.